This invention relates to communication systems and, in particular, to sending signaling messages through a communication network.
Communication systems provide the medium by which one user at a first endpoint of the system may communicate to one or more other users of the system at one or more other endpoints. However, before users of a system can communicate with each other, the network of the system must first set up a data/signal path for the information to be transferred.
A first prior art approach setting up such signaling path is known as native signaling. Native signaling involves transferring the signals from each of the endpoints of the system via an intermediate switching network (or simply network). That is, the signals from each of the users must pass through the network before being transferred to its destination user. Essentially, the network interprets the signals and is responsible for establishing the connections between those two endpoints. However, a disadvantage of this approach is that the network must be responsible for passing many different signaling protocols based on the potentially many different signaling protocols of the users desiring to communicate. This places an undesirable burden on the network. Further, even after the connection is made, the data must still be processed by the network.
A second prior art approach to setting up such signaling path is known as emulation. Emulation allows many different protocols to be sent to the network. However, emulation requires the user""s equipment to translate every one of its native protocol messages into an appropriate internal message for use by the network. Further, the network must then translate the internal message to a message that can be understood by the destination user""s equipment. This technique places a substantial burden on the network because it requires a complex design of internal message signaling for the network since there must exist an analogous message, one from every different potential signaling protocol, or else certain signaling protocols will not be able to be processed by the network.
Hence, what is needed is a method for transferring data between users of a broadband communication system that does not substantially burden the system by virtue of the passage of data.